American Go E-Journal » Go Spotting

Buzzfeed’s “10 Awesome Board Games”: Go made Buzzfeed’s list of “10 Awesome Board Games You Probably Haven’t Heard Of” back in 2012. It came in at #6, behind Eureka, The Settlers of Catan, Dominion, Diplomacy and Say Anything, but it did beat out Agricola, Wits & Wagers, Puerto Rico and Betrayal at House on the Hill. “While ‘Go’ is, in essence, two players just taking turns laying stones on a grid,” says BuzzFeed, the level of depth to the game is actually astounding.photo: Luis de Bethencourt / CC BY http://2.0 / Flickr: luisbg; thanks to Joshua Guarino for passing this along.

Bananya: In the current season of the anime series “Bananya,” the main character is seen watching TV during Episode 3 with one of the channels being a televised go game, reports Grant Farmer. “Bananya watches the game for about 12 seconds and, as a cat who lives in a banana, does not understand the game,” says Farmer. “The nature documentary style narrator of Bananya asserts it was a good move, but admits to not actually knowing.”

Ralph Hewins’ The Japanese Miracle Men (1967) provides portraits of the most influential Japanese tycoons of the post-war period, “and for several of them it is highlighted that they were keen go players,” writes Erwin Gerstorfer. “Some of them even having the highest amateur Dan level of that time.” Among the go-playing tycoons behind the economic rise of Japan after World War II were Taizō Ishizaka and oil magnate Taro Yamashita. In the book, Ishizaka, who was president of the Japanese Federation of Economic Organizations and promoted go internationally, relates his go experience and his success in business, Gerstorfer says.

“Recently saw the films My Golden Days (2015) and Dragon Inn (1967, left) at the Cleveland Cinematheque,” writes Steve Zilber. “The first has the boyfriend starting to teach his new girl friend how to play (just a few seconds) and the second has two Chinese soldiers playing before they’re attacked (again, just a few seconds). Zilber is president of the Cleveland Go Club.

Order of the Stick: “Order of the Stick is my favorite D&D type role-playing comic strip,” writes Mark Gilston. “So I was delighted to see the go reference by the Oriental style paladins” in this recent strip.

Sandra and Woo: “From the webcomic ‘Sandra and Woo’ I could not help but laugh at the ‘Reality in the year 2050′ panel,” writes Taylor Litteral.

“I was watching some beta play-testing for the new ‘Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst’ video game,” writes Erik Walton, “(and) there’s a cut scene in which the protagonist Faith is walking in to talk with her mentor, and it turns out he’s playing go with one of the other characters. They even have some nicely rendered wooden bowls.”
The dialogue from the shot, Walton reports: Young character: “I don’t get this game, it has no logic to it!” Mentor: “You’ll get used to it. Faith used to beat me all the time, didn’t you Faith?”

Also: We’ve also received a report from Gordon Castanza that during “Hell on Wheels” Season 5, Episode 10, titled “61 Degrees,” “between minutes 43 and 45, a game of go is being played.” If anyone can track down a screenshot, please send it along!

“In the 1949 movie ‘Stray Dog’ Toshiro Mifune plays a homicide detective looking a criminal,” writes David Matson. “Ten minutes before the end he scans a room for suspects. The two men who best fit the description are both in their late 20′s, wearing white linen suits and white hats with wide black bands. Both men are reading newspapers. One man has an open-collared white dress shirt with no tie, sunglasses and a watch on his left wrist. The other has a crew-neck sweater with horizontal stripes. I watched this on Hulu, viewed on a small laptop, but I think both newspapers showed go game diagrams (different games).”

“I just listened to one of my favorite podcasts called Freakonomics Radio with Steven Dubner,” writes Aaron Murg. The title of this episode is called “How to Win Games and Beat People,” and it is all about board games. In it, they interview a board game historian who mentions go within the first 5 minutes! The podcast would be very interesting to any board game player and informational as to the economics of board games.

As AlphaGo finished playing the first round of its historic matches against Lee Sedol, news media around the world was reaching out to go organizations around the world. In the US there was a large number of print and internet publications. In three cases AlphaGo was talked about on TV for the US. The Daily Show covered AlphaGo and its AI prowess. On March 9th Michael Chen met with Poppy Harlow on CNN’s Quest Means Business on CNN International. During the segment they discussed the importance of the match and some basic of the game (Transcript). On March 10th Andrew Okun was interviewed by Ivan Watson from CNN International about the second loss from the matches. Okun talks about how far go has come to get to this point (Transcript).- Steve Colburn

“I was looking at manga online when I happened across this comic strip style manga called BugCat-Capoo,” writes Taylor Litteral. “It’s a very interesting series and had this cute scene of BugCat ‘playing Go’ against his dog friend.” This particular sequence, or chapter, is titled “Go Experts” and portrays BugCat and the dog pretending to play a heated game of go to the befuddlement of their caretaker. BugCat thinks of an impressive move only to realize that it was a mistake when his friend sabotages his plan. He gets mad and throws a tantrum, ruining the game, while his friend calmly watches.- edited by Crystal Lin & Joel Sherman